Is matter ethical? Is ethics material? An enquiry into the ethical dimension of Karen Barad’s ethico-onto-epistemological project

ABSTRACT

New materialism posits a non-anthropocentric ontology which gives rise to expanding the definition of the ethical subject and ethical relation. According to Karen Barad, who is one of the most prominent researchers in the field, ethicality exceeds the human domain and enfolds the whole of existence. Her project of ethico-onto-epistemology grounds ethics in ontology, perceiving it not as a product of a ‘social contract’, but one of the properties of matter, a phenomenon emerging from meaningful ‘intra-actions’ between entities. This paper explores the possibility of viewing Barad’s ethical project in the context of conventional understanding of ethics. It also considers the practicality of the philosopher’s theory. Particular attention is given to the question of how the concepts of individual freedom and responsibility, which appear to be some of the fundamental notions of ‘traditional’ ethics, can be reconciled with Barad’s new materialistic notions of intra-activity, mattering and split agency which question the idea of radical individualism.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• ontology
• intra-actions
• individuality
• response-ability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 And we have not set our foot outside the human species yet, beyond which plethora of various ways of experiencing, making sense of, responding to and interacting with the world exist.

2 Barad’s debt to Judith Butler’s work needs to be mentioned here, as well as a remark that Barad is critical of Butler’s theory presenting matter as a ‘passive product of discursive practices rather than as an active agent participating in the very process of materialization’ and regards her focusing on the materiality of the human bodies exclusively to be a too narrow perspective, see Barad 2003, 821–822 footnotes.

3 This supposition, provides the basis of consequentialism – which in turn falls under the broader category of teleological ethics – on which most contemporary judicial systems rest, which holds that the consequences of one's behaviour are the ultimate foundation of any judgment about the rightness or wrongness of that behaviour.

4 The term ‘free will’ is used here not as a religious term.

5 A particularly interesting example of a text in which Barad brilliantly presents a given event from various points of view, both global and individual, is their essay on Kyoko Hayashi’s novella From Trinity to Trinity (Barad 2017, 56–86).

6 It does, thus, rely on the classic definition of utility, phrased by Jeremy Bentham, which describes it as a ‘property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness, (…) or (…) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered’, (Bentham, Chapter 1), https://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/bentham/ipml/ipml.c01.html. The benefitting party would be, in this case, much broader, as it would not be limited to humans only, which was Bentham’s original idea, but would include non-human entities as well.

7 ‘Matter is an enfolding, an involution, it cannot help touching itself, and in this self-touching it comes in contact with the infinite alterity that it is (Barad 2012, 213).

8 The question of whether what looks like a masochistic tendency betrayed by matter, and by extension by humans as well, serves any particular purpose or is something matter remains in a way oblivious to/subconsciously ignorant of, is yet another interesting issue, which calls for a separate analysis.

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Notes on contributors

Małgorzata Kowalcze

Malgorzata Kowalcze is an early career researcher who holds PhD in English literature and a Master’s degree in philosophy. Her principal research interests are in the field of contemporary English literature, phenomenology, posthumanism and new materialism.